A thread on reddit offers an email purportedly from BioWare support informing the recipient of unspecified sanctions in Star Wars: The Old Republic, saying this was for accessing areas and loot meant for higher level characters in the just-launched MMORPG. There's a follow-up post on The Old Republic forums pointing out some discrepancies like typos and other issues that suggest this is not a legitimate email. There's also a post on Rock, Paper, Shotgun suggesting this may be a legitimate ban, and the player who was banned omitted details about how this was more of an exploit than described. Thanks Joao.

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“Well, the people on bioware fourm are saying he is actually banned for doing a “flip” exploit on the planet. not because he was low level and farming high level nodes. which makes a lot of sense to me. the flip exploit: from what i understand, when the control of the zone is changed from one faction to another, all the gathering nodes respawn. so if you have someone from the other team to cooperate and flip it back and forth, you would have infinite money. the reason why bioware mentioned he is there at low level is most likely to emphasis the fact he is exploiting there isn’t enough high level player to fight for the control of the zone yet. so he is also exploiting this fact by going there at low level. i think this makes the most sense. as stupid and unreasonable as EA support is, to be banned for playing the game different is too much.”

Directly from the rock paper shotgun link.

He wasn't banned for looting high level areas. He was banned because he and a friend were in a high level pvp area co-operating to force the area to swap from imperial to republic control over and over to force the collection nodes to re-spawn instantly.

It's an OBVIOUS exploit, and not something you can accidentally do. Considering the mechanics of it, there's no question that they were intentionally exploiting it.